[Nfb-web] Desktop Texting Applications

[Blaine Clark]

Hello Peter and Mary,

Generally, sending texts to phones from computers is easy, once you've 
got the phone's texting address. There are ways to do this through most 
email clients or programs such as OutLook, OutLook Express, Microsoft 
Mail, Thunderbird, Evolution and several others.

To find out your phone's texting address, send a text message from your 
phone to your email address, or have your friends simply send a text 
message to your email address. When it arrives, add the From: address to 
your address book and identify it's name as so and so's texting address. 
For example; texting from my phone through Verizon to my Comcast email 
account on my computer I get this as my From: address; 
0123456789 at VTEXT.COM. That's not my real phone number of course! When 
texting from your computer to a cell phone, remember that most carriers 
limit the size of the message, so experiment with the size of your 
messages to see where they get cut off. There are very few phone 
carriers that don't allow computers to send text messages to their phone 
customers.

For example, I copy and trim weather forecasts for a few days and 
email/text them to my phone. I don't have to pay anyone for that service!

Now, for a page that lists most world-wide carriers, here's 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_carriers_providing_SMS_transit Find 
out who your friend's service carriers are and tack the appropriate 
@provider.name onto their numbers and surprise the daylights out of them!

As for texting to Pepsi from a computer ... sorry, haven't found the 
trick to that yet, and you've got me curious now, but here's one option; 
review the information on the following web site and then contact Pepsi 
about their CAPTCHA. Don't waste your time telling them to drop the 
CAPTCHA, they won't because it serves a very important function for them 
... it keeps spam-bots from bombarding their submission form. Instead 
ask them to make it easier for people to find and/or understand the 
CAPTCHA, use different formats, audible alternatives, better labeled 
form fields, a clear text page alternative without the Flash crap, 
whatever it takes to make it easily accessible for you, but still 
spam-bot proof for them. Here's the web page of good info; 
http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/responding/. Mark this one in your 
Bookmarks! I did. Note what the W3 people say about the information you 
need to give to Pepsi to help them understand where you're coming from.

Now, to contact Pepsi ... the last link on the Pepsi home page is a 
contact us link to a page full of forms, but pretty much the whole page 
is a Flash application, ahrgh! http://www.pepsi.com/ And then there's 
this page; http://pepsico.com/Contacts.html. It lists several business 
email addresses, postal addresses and phone numbers and is a text-based 
page. It might be worthwhile to get a small group to contact them and 
talk about their site with them or write a few letters.

I used to use a WebVisum addon to the FireFox browser to decipher 
CAPTCHAs, but now so many of them are presented in Flash applications 
and WebVisum just can't penetrate Flash. WebVisum is still good for 
deciphering other CAPTCHAs and for collaborative labeling of poorly 
marked page elements ... as long as they aren't Flash!

Good luck!


On 08/10/2010 01:00 PM, nfb-web-request at nfbnet.org wrote:
> Good afternoon everyone,
>
>      We wish to cast our votes for the NFB Youth SLAM to receive funding from Pepsi but not if we must deal with CAPTCHAS thank you. Since we don't have talking cell phones we're curious to know if there are desktop applications that allow one to send text messages as if they were doing it from a cell phone and how usable are they by the blind?
>
>      We want to participate but not if we're forced to deal with Web site security methods that lock us out. If there's a way tos submit our votes from our desktops as text messages freeing us from dealing with any CAPTCHAS for any part of the process that would be wonderful. We want to see the Youth SLAM funded but not at the expense of stances regarding Web site accessibility taking a back seat when money is up for grabs.
>
> Peter and Mary Donahue
>
>
>